Am I the one who is sitting on the stone, or am I the stone on which he is sitting?*
"In front of this wall was a slope in which was embedded a stone that jutted out—my stone.
Often, when I was alone, I sat down on this stone, and then began an imaginary game that went something like this: “I am sitting on top of this stone and it is underneath.’
But the stone also could say “I” and think: 1 am lying here on this slope and he is sitting on top of me.”
The question then arose: “Am I the one who is sitting on the stone, or am I the stone on which he is sitting?”
This question always perplexed me, and I would stand up, wondering who was what now.
The answer remained totally unclear, and my uncertainty was accompanied by a feeling of curious and fascinating darkness.
But there was no doubt whatsoever that this stone stood in some secret relationship to me.
I could sit on it for hours, fascinated by the puzzle it set me
* Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Page 20 - You may read the autobiography here:
You may read more contexts of stone, and Jung's various views of such, their meanings, at this page online:
Carl Jung sitting on a stone beside
his lake side Tower home he built
himself. Note his shadow on the stone,
both foundational to his psychology
“I am an orphan, alone: nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons.” - C.G. Jung, this was carved by Jung on a stone at his tower in Bollingen
What remains of a stone well-house
Keene, New York
Our Mutual Confession Invisibly Drawn
for us all —
in un-storied
astonishment
Here horseflies feast.
Upon weathered stones are
only creases where once were
names, dates, God's Word,
chiseled by a now unknown
hand,
an impression only, one
among many, reduced to no
plot but that of Providence
left to surmise swatting at
Eucharistic flies proving only
flesh and only blood,
a flood of questions eventually
exhaled and exhaling still,
waiting beside a white rock
with wings,
ignoring fires,
leaning into changes.
—Warren Falcon
Beach rocks with guano-glyphs.
Long Island Sound, NY
Jung's Letter to Pastor Jahn
An essential letter below, where Jung points out that, like most religions and their creeds, systems, codes, methods, doctrines, they are applied top down. Individuals/groups "plug" themselves into them and apply sanctified methods which induce (if done corredtly) "religious experiences that fit to form and must always conform to creed, dogma, doctrine, traditions developed and sanctified by the priestly trained and given the "Good Housekeeping Seal" as clergy who guides the "flock" as shepherd does sheep.
As you clearly states in the letter below, his method is the exact opposite of the above. He starts from the bottom, the living psyche, the unconscious, both personal and transpersonal (archetypal) which each individual is being lived by but often does not know it. Good news/tough news is that each individual can have a more conscious relationship to that which is living them - one may do so by working with dreams and other content of the unconscious which does indeed get into dialogue with the one who is paying attention, has demonstrated that they know that the Psyche is real, active and interactive thus developing ways to communicate in the space between the conscious (ego) and the unconscious (personal and collective and archetypal).
Jung's letters, Volumes 1 and 2 may be downloaded free at this link (it is safe to download):
Volume 1:
Volume 2:
You may also download Jung's Collected Works FREE at this website - just scroll down to the bottom of the page where you will see a pdf to download or you can open individual books. "C. G. Jung Speaking" is a great way to get introduced to Jung, from early years to ripe old age:
Carl Jung's letters are great resources since he is responding personally to individuals who write him with questions, protests, critiques, etc. He lets his hair down in the letters and usually his explanations and responses are more accessible. There are also wonderful letters where he is talking about a dream and explicates it with lots of mythic and symbolic material re: say, bees or elephants or a young man's fascination with Yoga and he has a dream where a snake is being devoured by a bird. Jung is brilliant and clear in his working that dream...the letters are
C. G. Jung letter to Pastor Jahn
7 September 1935
Dear Pastor Jahn,
I am sorry that pressure of work has prevented me from answering your kind letter. Please forgive me. It is very kind of you to have gone into my work so thoroughly. With your permission, I would like to draw your attention to a few points that have struck me.
I am sorry that pressure of work has prevented me from answering your kind letter. Please forgive me. It is very kind of you to have gone into my work so thoroughly. With your permission, I would like to draw your attention to a few points that have struck me.
It seems to me that you approach my views too much from the angle of the theologian. You seem to forget that I am first and foremost an empiricist, who was led to the question of Western and Eastern mysticism for empirical reasons. For instance, I do not by any means take my stand on Tao or any Yoga techniques, but I have found that Taoist philosophy as well as Yoga have very many parallels with the psychic processes we can observe in Western man. Nor do I get anybody to draw or contemplate mandala pictures as in Yoga, but it has turned out that unprejudiced people take quite naturally to these aids that come to light.
A point which theologians very often overlook is the question of the reality of God. When I speak of God, I always speak as a psychologist, as I have expressly emphasized in many places in my books. For the psychologist the God-image is a psychological fact. He cannot say anything about the metaphysical reality of God because that would far exceed the limits of the theory of knowledge. As an empiricist I know only the images originating in the unconscious which man makes of God, or which, to be more accurate, are made of God in the unconscious; and these images are undoubtedly very relative.
Another point is the relation between the psychological I and Thou. The unconscious for me is a definite vis-a-vis with which one has to come to terms. I have written a little book** about this. I have never asserted, nor do I think I know, what the unconscious is in itself. It is the unconscious region of the psyche. When I speak of psyche, I do not pretend to know what it is either, and how far this concept extends. For this concept is simply beyond all possibility of cognition. It is a mere convention for giving some kind of name to the unknown which appears to us psychic. This psychic factor, as experience shows, is something very different from our consciousness. If you have ever observed a psychosis in a person you know intimately, you will know what a dreadful confrontation that can be. It seems to me that it is difficult for a theologian to put himself in an empiricist's shoes. What the theologian takes to be spiritual realities are for the empiricist expressions of psychic life, which at bottom is essentially unknown. The empiricist does not think from above downwards from metaphysical premises, but comes from below upwards from the phenomenal world and, conscious of the limitations of the mind, must be content with understanding the psychic processes reconstructively. And so it is with my therapy. I have chiefly to do with people in whom I cannot implant any values or convictions from above downwards. Usually they are people whom I can only urge to go through their experiences and to organize them in a way that makes a tolerable existence possible. The pastor of souls is naturally not in this position as a rule; he has to do with people who expressly demand to be spiritually arranged from above downwards. This task should be left to the pastor of souls. But those rarer people who cannot accept traditional values and convictions, who in other words do not possess the charism of faith, must perforce seek advice from the empiricist, who for his part, in order to do justice to his task, can appeal to nothing except the given realities. Thus he will on no account say to his patient, "Your psyche is God," or "Your unconscious is God," because that would be just what the patient has fled from in disgust. Rather he will start off the psychic process of experiencing unconscious contents, whereby the patient is put in a position to experience his psychic realities and draw his own conclusions. What I described in the Golden Flower are simply the results of individual developments which closely resemble those arrived at through Eastern practices. Centuries ago Yoga congealed into a fixed system, but originally the mandala symbolism grew out of the unconscious just as individually and directly as it does with Western man today. I had known about the spontaneous emergence of these symbols for 17 years but deliberately published nothing on this subject so as to prevent the regrettable but undenial imitative instinct from getting hold of these pictures. In these 17 years I had ample opportunity to see again and again how patients quite spontaneously reached for the pencil in order to sketch pictures that were meant to express typical inner experiences. Yoga, however, as we know it today, has become a method of spiritual training which is drilled into the initiands from above. It holds up the traditional pictures for contemplation and has precise rules as to how they should be executed. In this respect Yoga is directly comparable to the Exercitia of Loyola. But that is the exact opposite of what I do. I am therefore an avowed opponent of take over of Yoga methods or Eastern ideas uncritically [this is an essential word!!], as I have stated publicly many times before.
So what I have said on these matters is the result of empirical work and does not constitute the technical principles of therapy...
So what I have said on these matters is the result of empirical work and does not constitute the technical principles of therapy...
Yours sincerely, C. G. Jung
[Italics in red are my emphasis - not Jung's though I think he would approve since yoga is now a "spiritual commodity" in the Western world, what Tibetan Buddhist teacher Trungpa Rimpoche calls "spiritual materialism", and what I call for decades now "Bestseller "Spirituality", and what writer/theologian Harvey Cox prophetically diagnosed in the 1970's as "the trivialization of the sacred":
"If there is any fault to be allocated, it lies not with the victims [of commercialization of spiritualities] but with the buyer-seller nexus within which the new Oriental (sic) religious wave is marketed. Despite what may be good intentions all around, the consumer mentality can rot the fragile fruits of Eastern spirituality as soon as they are unpacked. The process is both ironic and pathetic. What begins in Benares as a protest against possessiveness ends up in Boston as still another possession. Dark Kali, the great and terrible destroyer, whose very glance can melt the flesh of the strongest warrior, whose slightest breath can stop the pulse and paralyze the soul, finds herself dangling from bracelets with all the other charms.
No deity however terrible, no devotion however deep, no ritual however splendid is exempt from the voracious process of trivialization [my italics]. The smiling Buddha himself and the worldly-wise Krishna can be transformed by the new gluttony (my italics) into collectors' trinkets. It was bad enough for King Midas that everything he touched turned to gold; the acquisition-accumulation pattern of the new gluttony does even more. Reversing the alchemist's course, it transforms rubies and emeralds into plastic, the sacred into the silly, the holy into the hokey...(a) changing of the gods into consumer software..." —pg. 134, Turning East, The Promise and Peril of the New Orientalism, Harvey Cox, Simon and Schuster, 1975. Cox changed the title as the word "orientalism" was no longer in popular usage. The newer title is Why Americans Look to the East for Spirituality—And What That Search Can Mean to the West [Click either title and the page with the quote above will appear].
**The "little book" Jung mentions that he had written is The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious. Collected Work, Vol 8 which you may read here (free download):
Maine Rocks, Back Island of Peaks Island
A grand herm near Mount Marcy, upstate NY
Autumnal Math (circa 1981 - near Chimney Rock)
The ground assumes its portent.
The good of the season remains in what is left behind.
It takes what lays down or is laid down upon it.
You'd think it a kind of king of accountants.
You'd sink down an addition of arithmetics,
heartbeats, breaths, footings found and lost,
all the unintended landings of a life.
You'd think it wouldn't stop.
You'd sink down even wide awake in this season.
Such sinking pretends its endings in countless
geometries of folding life down or over and under
sundering fractions apart, forgetting theorems, all
but the final one. The rest can change or pretend to.
Admit you are no good at numbers.
Admit you can only count to a certain sum,
or down to it. Reverse your life if you want to,
wind it down with a memory. Beef up the end.
Noble or not, you can fake it.
Planning is what counts for indemnity.
You can make it seem to make sense.
You can try a new line on every stranger you meet.
You've only begun to juggle Euclid anew under
white lids painted shut with mortician's abacus.
You know a new counting accounting for fainter
signs, new ground to flick numbers between your teeth.
What's left behind is now wrong.
The good of it is what belongs to the
laying down of lines about what you've
finally done. Recounting your old formulas
gives some lingering warm to nerves on edge.
No hedging now.
The ground assumes its importance.
The season rattles all our leaving
in its cupped hand.
That We Can Be Broken, Bird Spirit Speaks - circa 70's
It means so much that we can be broken. —N. Nightingale
Citizen! What have they done with all the air? —Victor Serge
6
How all this will turn
I do not burn to know.
I only yearn here,
air and more,
for air now air
(all the more)
(all the more)
in sustained
moments.
moments.
without height,
some thing
returns or
turns inward
that may be
climbed to
rest upon
or fall again
into
some
chimney
life
life
to be found,
itself,
a winged burden.
**
If interested in a Jungian perspective of Eastern religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, you may be greatly informed, oriented, enriched by these three volumes by George R. Elder, Ph.D. Click below to explore all three volumes:
The Snake and the Rope, A Jungian View of Hinduism (new 2nd Edition - this link opens to the first):
The Self and the Lotus: A Jungian View of Indian Buddhism - Volume 1 (Google preview:
The Self and the Lotus: A Jungian View of Indian Buddhism - Volume II (Google preview):
***
Dark woods ongoing, nor (personal) white rose as of yet.
Easter 2016 - Keene, NY
08-2-2025
Rafter thots, not after. a cull
from earlier poetic efforts—
Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind,
I have been taken up into grief, the strange
relief of clouds. Soon departed I shall be
once again returned to disquieted prayer,
the proud monk to his rites rejoined
such are covers for disjointedness.
There, almost within reach, the blossoming
tree brightens between darker bricks to truly
dwell. It is for me a shy son of mists to see
in spite of big chunks missing, lost, wasted,
torn out, that the Celestial World is not as
it appears to most - It yearns for much needed
hardness for spirits without shoes still long
to be bread that they may dwell in our finitude.
relief of clouds. Soon departed I shall be
once again returned to disquieted prayer,
the proud monk to his rites rejoined
such are covers for disjointedness.
There, almost within reach, the blossoming
tree brightens between darker bricks to truly
dwell. It is for me a shy son of mists to see
in spite of big chunks missing, lost, wasted,
torn out, that the Celestial World is not as
it appears to most - It yearns for much needed
hardness for spirits without shoes still long
to be bread that they may dwell in our finitude.
Dear uncommon friends, Old Strand, and my
zen quill and pen-ners of the East, imbibers of
tea and samsara, cackling cocks and hens in the
locked and guarded shunyata pens of the world,
you all have become wholeness-itself by now.
I am reading reading crowded pushed your many
years behind me hoping I may gather what you
all have found in the dusk where the trail ends
at the highest peak.
Ruffling all your bright feathers your chorus
Ruffling all your bright feathers your chorus
clucks/KATZ crows up from the frozen stream
black below—
No becoming.
What is there to be found?
Black Rooster, blind,
scratches all dawns.
. . .still in this night I am turning
and turning upon the hard pallet
these old pages that I have turned
now over 40 years in starry exile
as if my tongue could matter less by day
than my thoughts could mean more by night
these constant companions the good few
who lend voice to all that goes on
inked between and upon ledges high and in
canyon-ed depths what continues seen or not
such are strayed
ponies bending their heads to
finer blades tender shoots green or in winter
without complaint chew brown tufts brittle
shadowing snow and a pair boot tracks
veering off
What is there to be found?
Black Rooster, blind,
scratches all dawns.
. . .still in this night I am turning
and turning upon the hard pallet
these old pages that I have turned
now over 40 years in starry exile
as if my tongue could matter less by day
than my thoughts could mean more by night
these constant companions the good few
who lend voice to all that goes on
inked between and upon ledges high and in
canyon-ed depths what continues seen or not
such are strayed
ponies bending their heads to
finer blades tender shoots green or in winter
without complaint chew brown tufts brittle
shadowing snow and a pair boot tracks
veering off
and up
or down
alone trail into other fields or
upon remote peaks
alone trail into other fields or
upon remote peaks
only song's
a traveler's companion
a traveler's companion
Screen grab directly above the texts cull is from Dionysos Speed by Rainer J, Hanshe:
***
[NOTE: You may click on each photo to enlarge the image. All photos except for the one of Jung are by Warren Falcon (all rights reserved)]
